When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.

Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.

Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.

Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.

Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap.

In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share.

The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)

How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on.

My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier".

To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.

The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.

"Don't make me talk to your [customer support] chatbot" reads like "Don't make me go to an ATM for a cash withdrawal". If I can solve a thing quickly and effectively without waiting forever to speak to an overworked customer support agent on another contitent, I would very much like that!

Well, anyways, the post is not about that. It's about posting AI-generated text (blog posts, PR summaries). Which I agree with, although there are a bunch of holes in the argument, such as:

> 1. Figure out what you want to say. 2. Say it. That first figuring-out part is important.

Well, yeah, I can figure out what I want to say, then have the chatbot say it. So looks like the second part is important, too.

My first round of code review has become a back and forth with the original author just asking them questions about their description, before I even bother to look at code. At first I decided I’d just be a stick in the mud and juniors would learn to get it right the first time, but it turns out I’m just burning myself out due to spite instead.

If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas.

The problem is people are wielding AI right now and either [a] the models they are using are not good enough, [b] they aren't being given enough context, or [c] they are deployed in a way that makes it sloppy

(Insert joke about whether this comment is AI. It's not, but joke away)

Side note, the number of comments here from people who clearly didn’t read the article is impressive

That's the aspect I don't understand. The information I want is almost always something some other customers have asked already. I'd much prefer to avoid their customer support maze entirely and help myself on a searchable wiki. Unfortunately, most company's online product support FAQs usually only contain answers to obvious shit on the order of RTFM and "is it plugged in." Why not just post the doc their advanced tier 3 support people share amongst themselves? It can be under a warning label like 'preliminary advanced info for engineers'.

I realize people like me represent only around 2-3% of the customers seeking support but it's 2-3% that is able to self-serve and takes more time than average because we invariably have to work through front-line support to get escalated to someone with the non-obvious info that's still been asked many times before. So maybe we're only ~2% but we suck up 4% of support bandwidth and we probably take up closer to ~20% of Tier 3 support - the most expensive, scarce type.

Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product.

Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support.

I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."

It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you.

However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all.

Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you, in response to your prompts, it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.

Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.

This last time, it sent me to a Chatbot. In five minutes, I got a cheaper rate than I was previously paying. I'm sort of looking forward to the next interaction to see if I can get even cheaper rates or finally cancel the service.

This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.

I see it in a reddit post, or a twitter comment, I've suspected it in text messages. And like that angle, the like "you're a human. can you please, just" and feeling a little out there for pouring my soul into every word I right wherever it is, like, that idea resonates. That frustration to be reading a lengthy blurb in what's become an over-saturated style where I have to work even harder to discern their real meaning than if they were actually that verbose to begin with.

But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."

Don't make me talk to a chatbot while there is zero forward progress in solving the problem.

Forcing a customer anything beyond that is RUDE!

I used a product that implemented a VERY good AI chatbot as part of their email support and it was better than human support. It was nearly instant in its response time and answered all of my questions perfectly.

In fact, it wasn't until after the interaction that I realized it was an AI bot! Pretty good IMO and I'd prefer that interaction over holding "...because your call IS important to us."

I don't want to contact customer support in the first place, if I'm forced to, it's because something is very wrong and in that case I don't want to be listening to elevator music and "your call is important to us, please hold" for an hour, and get my call disconnected forcing me to call again.

Issue is that I've yet to have a chatbot actually fix my issues, or most 1st contact human operators for that matter.

  > The only acceptable pro-AI response to the accusation of AI Slop is to join team Anti-Slop.

We do need to be more tolerant of AI writing though. Some people need it because they can't express their ideas well themselves. You wouldn't say "no wheeled vehicles allowed inside" because that would exclude handicapped people who need wheelchairs.

No we don't, and neither should you. Don't make me read your chatbot's PR.

Apparently my mobile provider switched to a voice chatbot only phone system in September. I called them today because of a price increase and some weird long distance charges on my bill.

I call, the chatbot answers, I confirm my account info and enter my PIN then ask it “why did my price go up”, “your price went up because we made a change to your account”. Wow, super. I ask it if it can reduce the price, no. I ask it about the long distance charges and it tells me to check my account statement online. I ask to be transferred to an human and it asks why, but it does transfer me over to their callback system. As a first line of support defence, that wasn’t so bad.

The timing of the transfer is off so I only hear half of what the callback system says. It requires me to verify the number I want to be called back on, then I tells me I can type in a time I want the callback. I think to myself, is this 24 hour time, how does AM/PM work, what time-slots are available, how do those work?

While I’m thinking about all of this it repeats the instructions. I type in 1 minute into the future because I don’t want to waste my own time waiting, just please call me back ASAP. “That time was unavailable”. I guess that makes sense, it’s very soon and maybe slots are on 5 minute windows. I have to confirm my phone number again and I can enter a new time. I try 10 minutes from now, that’s on a clean 5 minute boundary. Nope. Confirm again and try the nearest 15 minute boundary. Nope — and this time it hangs up and I have to call back and start from zero.

I call back and explain to the bot (again) that I need to talk a human, it’s a billing issue, thanks. It fails to understand me and that seems to get it stuck in a loop. After two more turns it asking me to repeat myself I hang up and call back again. This time the bot does understands me and I try 3 more callback times for today, all of which fail, and it hangs up.

I’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to a wall and punching in numbers. The phone wall is clearly unassailable — all paths lead to the broken callback subsystem.

I try the text chat bot on the site. I convince it to put me in contact with a human chat operator, who I then have to convince it’s worth it for them to call me because he couldn’t help me and it took over 1 minute per chat turn/iteration.

Finally a human calls me! Before we can talk I need to open a text, click the link, then enter the code she tells me, then enter my account PIN. It felt like I might be getting phished, this required such a weird chain of info. She tells me they put a notice of the price increase in my December bill (which was the right amount, so I didn’t read it), so this is all above board. She says if I want a cheaper plan I should check the app and she won’t even tell me what the options are. I ask if they’ll price match competitors and she says no.

At this point I told her I was considering leaving if they won’t price match (and also that the new support service was very bad). She says she’s sorry to hear that, to check the app, then pauses and asks me if I’m happy with my internet services, as if anything about our interaction says “please sign me up with more services!” I know they have to ask about the upsell because they always do, but wow.

The entire reason I’ve been a customer so long was that for a decade I would call and within 5 minutes be able to update my account to a new plan. Usually the support staff were nice and could offer me some loyalty discount, and I was happy.

I just (as in just) finished cancelling my entire account, then checked HN, and “Don’t make me talk to your chatbot” is the top article. Serendipity at its finest.

The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to.

I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure.

Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling appeals to prior authorization denials, wasting even more physician time.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...

"Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams